5 ways to never stop drawing I learned this year
I started 2015 knowing that my drawing skills needed a push. The wise words of spanish illustrator Puño from his totally recomendable speach echoed in my mind: “Never stop drawing”. Feeling comfortable with a pencil on your hands will always be helpful for any creative task, not only to Art or Design professionals but maybe just because visual thinking improves everyhting.
Twelve months later, I have summed up this five ways to keep yourself drawing:
Daily Spitpaint group
A nice mixture of being inspired by others´work, being challenged to create in a daily basis and to be easily encouraged to share your artwork. Daily Spitpaint is a Facebook group where you can find every day 3 different topics from which to create 30 minute drawings or paintings. Join now, we are more than 61.000 members!
SketchBomb
5 years ago, Mike Henry and a group of illustrators, animators and other artists from the San Francisco bay area started to meet once a month to sketch, eat, laugh, drink, and have a good time. Today, the idea behind Sketchbomb has spread to a bunch of cities around the globe. I learned about SketchBomb Barcelona thanks to Meetup.com, so take a look and find out where is your nearest meeting!
Live drawing sessions
Another way to improve your sketching skills and meet people at the same time. Apart form the classic academic live drawing sessions, which are perfectly OK, I have recently found ANIMATIONFX STUDIO: specifically tailored sessions to people interested in the fields of animation, illustration, comic and conceptual design. Disney has been sending its animators to this kind of classes for years, find out why!
Sketching apps
Beside all the previous “social” proposals, another way to encourage yourself is finding new tools to play and practice with. Turning your mobile or tablet into a sketching canvas may provide you some new creative opportunities. There are some pretty cool sketching apps, but I would particularly recommend Procreate. A great interface, lot of brushes options, a strong support service and pretty cool functionalities such as Quickline makes the price totally worth it.
Online learning communities
Nowadays you can find very specific and relatively afordable online courses to improve your skills or learn some new ones. Sites like Gnomon, Schoolism, CG Society or Skillshare provide tons of content to expand your drawing ways. Somehow closing the circle started with Puño´s speach, I want to recommend his online course about how to draw with graphic tablets at Domestika, an online learning community for Spanish speakers.
And if none of the previous choices suit you, just make some doodles on your notebook, have fun!
